Most people wouldn’t be too thrilled to have a beady-eyed bird plunge its talons into their arm.

But most people aren’t like Brian Salt. And most birds aren’t like the rough-legged Hawk that Salt is helping nurse back to health after it was hit by a truck — and then underwent two hours of tricky surgery — far from its Arctic home.

“A couple of days ago, he hammered me real good with his bad leg,” says Salt, the director of Salthaven Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education Centre. “He had his talons stuck right up to the toes in my arm. It was a painful experience . . . but it was really encouraging that he had that much strength back in that leg.”

Salt’s gleeful response to being gored may seem bizarre. (It’s also slightly inaccurate; although the hawk is an adult female, Salt regularly refers to it as “he.”)

But it makes sense once you understand the bird is an uncommon rough-legged hawk that, after having its right leg broken in a roadway collision near St. Marys, had a plate inserted by surgeons at Western University and is now recuperating at the Salthaven centre in Mt. Brydges, west of London.

“This is out of the norm,” says Salt, whose volunteer-staffed centre cared for nearly 1,000 sick, injured and orphaned wildlife last year. “These birds are big and beautiful and they migrate down here (from the Arctic) on occasion during the winter, then return in early spring. And surgery is always a delicate thing.”

After the collision, the injured bird was taken to the Oakridge Animal Clinic where veterinarian Tyrrel de Langley determined it had suffered a “proximal fracture” of its right femur. During a two-hour operation Jan. 23, de Langley and veterinarian Ian Welch inserted a tiny metal plate to fuse the break while it heals.

“Bird bone is very fragile and hard to work with,” says Welch, a researcher and professor at Western University. “But the first thing with birds like this isn’t so much whether you can fix it, but whether it can be fixed in a way that the bird can be released. It’s not a pet. It’s about rehabilitating back into the wild.”

Known for their ability to hover while hunting for rodents and other small prey, rough-legged hawks breed in the Aleutians and northern Alaska, east to Baffin Island.

And like most raptors, their legs are key to their survival.

“Their legs and feet are their guns,” says Salt. “They kill with those feet. And they have to be able to stand on their prey when they eat to stabilize it. So without full function (in its legs), this bird just won’t be releasable.”

But the surgery succeeded and the hawk is recuperating nicely.

During the coming weeks, Salthaven volunteers will administer physio-therapy by gently stretching the bird’s injured leg. Then it will be moved from the box-like “hood” where it’s now recovering and placed in an expansive “flight pen” where she can practise hunting.

If all goes well, Salt predicts the hawk will be released by the end of March.

But why go to such lengths — and spend several thousand dollars — to heal such a creature?

To anyone who sees the bird, the question is moot.

“A life is a life,” says Salt. “And we think compassion is a good thing to foster in any community.”